The BDSM Room, My Missing Car, and Sleeping with a College Kid
Last night I went to a party.
I mean, of course I did. I go to a lot of parties. But most of them are thrown by friends of mine, and are pretty low-key: bonfires in backyard and barbeques and the like.
But this time, I went a party through a website. It was a cocktail party, and we were instructed to dress to the nines and come on down to a fabulously expensive downtown apartment. I knew no one, but- you can’t be afraid of new people, right?
As soon as I got there, I got a tour. It was three bedrooms, two baths, a balcony overlooking the loop, a massive kitchen brimming with liquor. Oh, and a BDSM room. “You can touch the toys,” he told me and the other woman getting the tour. “But you can’t play with them. That’s another mailing list!” Then he showed us his cage, which was across from the massive bed. It looked to be a small closet with a new and cage-like door, which was quite clever.
I started drinking immediately. For one thing, I’m not impervious to nerves. For another, the party was only supposed to go to eleven, so I needed to get buzzed but still be sober when it was time to go. Oh, and of course I was the sixth one there, so it was super awkward at the beginning when we were all sort of staring at each other.
Which isn’t the fault of the host, who was doing his best to get people talking. Liquor+time+more people was the magic formula, and soon everyone was loose and chatty.
Around 10:30, a guy in a too-big sport coat showed up. “You can’t be older than 22,” I told him, and I was right. We still bonded, though, because both of us were recently single. I mentioned to him that after the party I was planning on hitting some bars, and it turned out he lived right where I was planning on drinking. “Maybe you can give me a ride,” he suggested.
11:00 came and went without sign of the host tiring, so a bunch of us ended up laying on huge, fancy couch in the library, chatting. College Kid put his arm around me, and you know, look. I’m not defending myself here, but I let him, and I found it generally distracting, and right now most everything I go do is an attempt to distract myself from feeling terrible and from doing something stupid like texting my ex. So I laid next to him and an incredibly tall man on the couch and talked to a chatty redheaded woman and let CK rub his fingers over my arm and contemplated maybe asking him to sleep with me when I drove him home. I’m not proud of this, but I’m not going to dissemble here either.
Around 2am, we all got kicked out, and I walked the kid to my car.
Well, I TRIED to. But it wasn’t there. I walked a few extra blocks, in case I’d forgotten where exactly I’d parked, but my car was gone.
I called 311, the non-emergency line for Chicago. They put me through to the local impound lot, which didn’t have it. I called 311 again, and asked to fill out a police report. The guy on the line yelled at me because I didn’t know what the exact address was that my car had been taken from. I called 911, who told me I couldn’t fill out a report without going into the station. I called 311 again, who told me I couldn’t leave because the squad car had to meet me there to fill out the report. I called 911, who said 311 was staffed by morons. They started to take my report, but told me to call back when their system wasn’t so slow.
At that point, I saw a squad car, and approached the officer and asked if she’d been sent to me to fill out this report. No, she explained, she was there for a movie shoot. My car probably got towed, she said, and no one at 911 or 311 actually cared if I got my car back. Also, by now it was about 4am, and no one I was going to see on the street at 4am had my best interest at heart. I should go to a hotel, she said, and CK told me I could crash at his place.
So I did, because what else was there to do? It was past 4, and I was keyed up, and my car was missing, the same car I just bought because I totalled my old car on my birthday and then I got dumped and now my car had been stolen and could this summer actually get any shittier? I’m fairly certain it couldn’t.
I ended up spending the night in his apartment, a studio he’s sharing for the summer with a girl who he apparently slept with before she moved in. She thought it meant something, he thought it did not, and now she wants his emotional support and hugs and he gives them to her and good lord, 22 year olds can be dumb. I got to sleep next to him, a complete stranger I’d only known for 6 hours, while wearing his shirt and shorts.
We didn’t have sex.
He more or less kicked me out at 10am, because he had to go to his friend’s apartment to do his laundry because it was $.75 cheaper a load, which may be the real age difference between us. However, first, he bought me a donut from Dunkin Donuts. Because to a 22 year old, I’m fairly certain this means something.
A friend of mine had seen my panicked status on facebook and asked me if I needed him to do anything, so I made him pick me up. I thought we’d go to the police station to fill out a report, but first I called the impound lot, who almost immediately told me that actually, they did have my car, and could I please pick it up before they had to really impound it?
That’s right, they’d moved my car for the movie shoot, so when Jupiter Rising (starring Human Thumb Head Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis) comes out if everyone could please boycott the stupid thing that would be super helpful thank you.
My friend H (who once proposed to throwingpens, who is half his age) took me to the impound lot, after driving around downtown for over half an hour. You see, the GPS, and the both of us, didn’t account for the fact that there’s Upper Wacker Drive, Lower Wacker Drive, and, as it would turn out, Lower Lower Wacker Drive, deep in the bowels of the city, where they hide impounded cars from nice suburban girls.
I have my car now, which is good, and I didn’t sleep with a college student, which is probably also good, and I’m giving up on socializing, which will probably last until tomorrow.